One advantage of the non-professional and non-hierarchical nature of the early natural food co-ops was that young women were able to gain skills and practice leadership in ways that may have not been open to them at the time in other, more conventional settings. In this interview for Radical Roots, we talk about this to Lori Zuidema and Eve MacLeish, former members of The Cheese Rustlers, a collective of women who distributed cheese to co-ops.

In honor of their groundbreaking work (and because they had an awesome logo), we are offering Cheese Rustlers t-shirts to everyone who donates $100 or more to Radical Roots at Seed & Spark.

Lori is now a manager at Co-op Partners Warehouse, the distributor that is part of The Wedge Co-op, which serves co-ops throughout the Upper Midwest (Co-op Partners also houses the Minnesota warehouse of Equal Exchange, source of the great coffee and chocolate you can get when you donate to Radical Roots).

Eve was a long-time Riverside Cafe collective member before joining the Cheese Rustlers, and now can be heard co-hosting Corazon Latino on KFAI on Tuesdays at noon (Look out next week for a post about the co-op connection to the founding of KFAI).